It is always nice to close the year on a positive note. The results from the Recruiting.com 2005 Best Blog awards were published today in their extensive survey covering several topics on blogs - from the best CEO blog to the best HR blogs. They placed our Taleo Talent Management Solutions Blog in the category called Best Third Party Recruiting Blog.

We are very happy and honored to report that we won our category!
But most of all, we thank all of our blog readers who voted for us! I hope you feel that the content of this blog is useful for developing your Talent Management initiatives. We look forward to providing more news and views in 2006. As always, suggestions are always welcome!

Workforce.com came up with a good table recently from a study by CLC showing some averages that should convince more people about the true cost and impact of talent movement.

In other words, it costs more than $3,000 in time for the recruiter and the manager per each new hire. For each 1,000 hires a company makes, the cost goes to $3M+ and top tier companies can save around $0.5 million on this alone.

That is the cost centric approach. But we have seen that there is way greater impact in your organization than simply taking a strictly cost centric approach.

In fact, the percentage of A-level hires going from 23% to 12% provides significantly more impact on your business than the $0.5 million savings. The opportunity cost of having a position open for 89 days versus 42 days is also very costly!

If you want to know more about the full financial impact of Talent Acquisition and Mobility, please refer to our research on it.

These days, sometimes we think we are back in 1999 with all the excitement brewing for new concepts using Internet technology that will change the world!

And indeed, Amazon.com changed the way we buy things, eBay changed how we sell things, and Monster.com changed the way we advertise jobs. Recently, many conversations have centered around the second wave of the Internet or Web 2.0.

In the talent management space, we saw several initiatives on the sourcing front including leveraging online social networks, referrals, and any techniques to see beyond the job boards.

Today we at Taleo are happy to announce an agreement with Jobster, who has been the most visible tool out there to leverage this new wave of sourcing we are calling Sourcing 2.0. But let’s remember that for all of you who are looking at new trends and choosing what to use, the new solution is not a replacement of the old medium, but a supplement.

Indeed when the cinema was invented, we counted the days left for the live theatres. When video emerged, we thought movie theatres will collapse. But today, they all live together.

The same is true for candidate sourcing. Newspapers are still a very powerful medium to attract and brand your company, as shown in the latest Conference Board survey and in the chart below. But the online job boards market grew in 10 years to about $2B, while the job classifieds is about $4B.

The momentum is of course towards the new medium, and Jobster is one good example of leveraging an age old practice (referrals) and digitize the process into a structured web solution.

We look forward to this new alliance. Jobster will help Taleo customers leverage the latest and greatest online method of sourcing better candidates!

HR Executive magazine has completed their HR challenge survey for 2005. They received 224 respondents who described their main challenge in 2005.

The #1 challenge was Staffing or Recruitment with 27%, followed by Compensation or Benefits with 25%. These two challenges dominated half the field! The next greatest issue in third was mentioned by only 8%.

This shows an increased emphasis compared to last year, where the first two challenges were the same. But staffing was at 21% and compensation was #1 at 26%. That’s a change of more than 25% in a single year!

What is our long-term trend prediction? Staffing or Recruitment at 45%! As demographic pressures continue to drive the reality of talent shortages to the forefront, the challenges of staffing, recruiting, and workforce planning will take an even larger share from compensation, benefits, training, and other concerns.

Lately the industry has been so focused on Google dominating the classified ad business that most people didn’t really look at challenging the established model.

We actually found one. And not in the US, but from Europe. It’s called JobDealer.

It is actually an eBay of jobs. Your organization posts the job on the site and individuals bid their services for a set salary amount! The online marketplace concept is a well known approach, and this site – even though very embryonic – is very interesting.

At Taleo, we have enabled our customers to display the salary range on the job description as an option for several years, but very few use it. So the future is open to see how the market will react to making public a data point (salary) that is usually kept very confidential in the talent bidding process

Coming from the same competitive perspective as Survivor, we’ve already seen reality TV cover the “You’re fired!” aspect of employment with The Apprentice. But how about a show called, “You’re Hired!”?

That premise might support the true reality of solving talent shortages in some critical professions, such as nursing! In fact, we recently saw a new reality TV show called NurseTV.

This show presents six nurses over 13 weeks where we “see how these nurses work, live, and play” as they reside together in a $10M mansion, go skydiving, and do some exotic activities.
Our healthcare customers should be ecstatic! With a lifestyle that glamorous, now everyone will want to be a nurse! That’s a great initiative to enhance the perception of a profession.

Reality TV also makes us think about what could you do to enhance the image of your company employer value proposition? We’ve already seen the TV ads for WalMart. But when do we see the reality show that enhances their brand?

But we would really like to see a show called: “YOU’RE HIRED!”

That’s the show where organizations compete for the limited numbers of top talent in a shrinking market of qualified candidates. The organization that captures the most top talent in 13 weeks wins the prize. Of course, they would need a talent focused mindset using the latest technology and assessments (such as Taleo) to clearly demonstrate competitive advantage!

A new SHRM survey titled 2005 U.S. Job Recovery and Retention delivers a staggering statistic. More than 75% of your employees could jump ship! Does that make your face turn red? Maybe you will look like them – matching the red or orange alerts shown below!

Not only that, but 80% of respondents said that they would increase the intensity of their searches if the economy improves!

Many companies have started to respond to this issue with 49% having special retention programs versus 35% last year.

So what to do? The easy answer has been to increase compensation. Indeed, money is the #1 reason mentioned (41%) when individuals leave. But in addition to this obvious reason, we often overlook career development (25%), opportunities (34%), or readiness for new experience (23%) that can be easily offered by organizations.

At Taleo, we helped several organizations implement our solution only for internal mobility purposes. In these leading companies, internal mobility is a mandate from the CEO to offer more opportunities to employees and be proactive with the workforce.

So, if you are like most organizations in this survey, you can prevent those (76%) unstable workers from jumping ship. Improved internal mobility and more visibility is a simple way to alleviate a fair amount of pain and lots of cost.